Multiplicities, fluctuations and correlations

The recent results on hadron multiplicities in heavy and light quark fragmentation, multiplicity local fluctuations and multiparticle correlations submitted to the Conference are reviewed.Comment: 5 pages, 4 eps figs. Talk given at the 31st International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP02), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 24-31 July 2002. To appear in the Proceeding

The effect of many sources on the genuine multiparticle correlations

We report on a study aimed to explore the dependence of the genuine multiparticle correlations on the number of sources when the influence of other possible factors during multihadron production are avoided. The analysis utilised the normalised cumulants calculated in three-dimensional phase space of the reaction ee -> Z -> hadrons using a large Monte Carlo sample. The multi-sources events were simulated by overlaying a few independent single ee annihilation events. It was found that as the number of sources increases, the cumulants do not change significantly their structure, but those of an order higher than two decrease fast in their magnitude. This reduction and its amount can be understood in terms of combinatorial considerations of source mixing which dilutes the correlations. The diminishing of the genuine correlations is consistent with recent cumulant measurements in hadron and nucleus induced reactions and should also be relevant to other dynamical correlations like the Bose-Einstein one, in ee -> WW -> hadrons and in nucleus-nucleus reactions

The many sources effect on the genuine multihadron correlations

Here we report on a study aimed to explore the dependence of the genuine multiparticle correlations on the number of sources while the influence of other possible factors affecting the multihadron production is avoided. The analysis utilised the normalised cumulants, calculated in three-dimensional phase space, of the reaction e+e- -> Z -> hadrons using a large Monte Carlo event sample. The multi-sources reactions were simulated by overlaying a few independent single e+e- annihilation events. It was found that as the number of sources S increases, the cumulants do not change significantly their structure, but those of an order q>2 (i.e. more than 2 pions) decrease fast in their magnitude. This reduction can be understood in termsof combinatorial considerations of source mixing which dilutes the correlations by a factor of about 1/S^{q-1} which can also serve as a method to estimated the number of sources. This expected suppression is well reproduced by recent cumulant measurements in hadron and nucleus induced reactions both in one (rapidity) and two (rapidity vs. azimuthal angle) dimensions. The diminishing genuine correlations effect should also appear in other dynamical correlations like the Bose-Einstein in e+e- -> W+W- -> hadrons and in nucleus-nucleus reactions.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figs. Invited talk presented by G. Alexander at the 9th International Workshop on Multiparticle Production: New Frontiers in Soft Physics and Correlations on the Threshold of the Third Millenium, Turin, Italy, June 12 - 17, 200

A Heat Diffusion Perspective on Geodesic Preserving Dimensionality Reduction

Diffusion-based manifold learning methods have proven useful in representation learning and dimensionality reduction of modern high dimensional, high throughput, noisy datasets. Such datasets are especially present in fields like biology and physics. While it is thought that these methods preserve underlying manifold structure of data by learning a proxy for geodesic distances, no specific theoretical links have been established. Here, we establish such a link via results in Riemannian geometry explicitly connecting heat diffusion to manifold distances. In this process, we also formulate a more general heat kernel based manifold embedding method that we call heat geodesic embeddings. This novel perspective makes clearer the choices available in manifold learning and denoising. Results show that our method outperforms existing state of the art in preserving ground truth manifold distances, and preserving cluster structure in toy datasets. We also showcase our method on single cell RNA-sequencing datasets with both continuum and cluster structure, where our method enables interpolation of withheld timepoints of data. Finally, we show that parameters of our more general method can be configured to give results similar to PHATE (a state-of-the-art diffusion based manifold learning method) as well as SNE (an attraction/repulsion neighborhood based method that forms the basis of t-SNE).Comment: 31 pages, 13 figures, 10 table

Description of local multiplicity fluctuations and genuine multiparticle correlations

Various parametrizations of the multiplicity distribution are studied using the recently published large statistics OPAL results on multidimensional local fluctuations and genuine correlations in e+e- -> Z -> hadrons. The measured normalized factorial and cumulant moments are compared to the predictions of the negative binomial distribution, the modified and generalized versions of it, the log-normal distribution and the model of the generalized birth process with immigration. This is the first study which uses the multiplicity distribution parametrizations to describe high-order genuine correlations. Although the parametrizations fit well the measured fluctuations and correlations for low orders, they do show certain deviations at high orders. We have shown that it is necessary to incorporate the multiparticle character of the correlations along with the property of self-similarity to attain a good description of the measurements.Comment: 15 pages, 2 ps figure

Coherent particle production in collisions of relativistic nuclei

Here we give the results of our study of features of dense groups, or spikes, of particles produced in Mg-Mg and C-Cu collisions at, respectively, 4.3 and 4.5 GeV/c/nucleon aimed to search for a coherent, Cerenkov-like, mechanism of hadroproduction. We investigate the distributions of spike centers and, for Mg-Mg interactions, the energy spectra of negatively charged particles in spikes. The spike-center distributions are obtained to exhibit the structure expected from coherent gluon-jet emission dynamics. This structure is similar in both cases considered, namely for all charged and negatively charged particles, and is also similar to that observed recently for all-charged-particle spikes in hadronic interactions. The energy distribution within spikes is found to have a significant peak over the inclusive background, while the inclusive spectrum shows exponential decrease with two characteristic values of average kinetic energy. The value of the peak energy and its width are in a good agreement with those expected for pions produced in a nuclear medium in the framework of the Cerenkov quantum approach. The peak energy obtained is consistent with the value of the cross-section maximum observed in coincidence nucleon-nucleus interaction experiments.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. Invited talk presented by E.S. at the 9th International Workshop on Multiparticle Production: New Frontiers in Soft Physics and Correlations on the Threshold of the Third Millenium, Turin, Italy, June 12 - 17, 200

Galaxy Zoo: Passive Red Spirals

We study the spectroscopic properties and environments of red spiral galaxies found by the Galaxy Zoo project. By carefully selecting face-on, disk dominated spirals we construct a sample of truly passive disks (not dust reddened, nor dominated by old stellar populations in a bulge). As such, our red spirals represent an interesting set of possible transition objects between normal blue spirals and red early types. We use SDSS data to investigate the physical processes which could have turned these objects red without disturbing their morphology. Red spirals prefer intermediate density regimes, however there are no obvious correlations between red spiral properties and environment - environment alone is not sufficient to determine if a spiral will become red. Red spirals are a small fraction of spirals at low masses, but are a significant fraction at large stellar masses - massive galaxies are red independent of morphology. We confirm that red spirals have older stellar popns and less recent star formation than the main spiral population. While the presence of spiral arms suggests that major star formation cannot have ceased long ago, we show that these are not recent post-starbursts, so star formation must have ceased gradually. Intriguingly, red spirals are ~4 times more likely than normal spirals to host optically identified Seyfert or LINER, with most of the difference coming from LINERs. We find a curiously large bar fraction in the red spirals suggesting that the cessation of star formation and bar instabilities are strongly correlated. We conclude by discussing the possible origins. We suggest they may represent the very oldest spiral galaxies which have already used up their reserves of gas - probably aided by strangulation, and perhaps bar instabilities moving material around in the disk.Comment: MNRAS in press, 20 pages, 15 figures (v3

The Morphology of Galaxies in the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey

We study the morphology of luminous and massive galaxies at 0.3<z<0.7 targeted in the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) using publicly available Hubble Space Telescope imaging from COSMOS. Our sample (240 objects) provides a unique opportunity to check the visual morphology of these galaxies which were targeted based solely on stellar population modelling. We find that the majority (74+/-6%) possess an early-type morphology (elliptical or S0), while the remainder have a late-type morphology. This is as expected from the goals of the BOSS target selection which aimed to predominantly select slowly evolving galaxies, for use as cosmological probes, while still obtaining a fair fraction of actively star forming galaxies for galaxy evolution studies. We show that a colour cut of (g-i)>2.35 selects a sub-sample of BOSS galaxies with 90% early-type morphology - more comparable to the earlier Luminous Red Galaxy (LRG) samples of SDSS-I/II. The remaining 10% of galaxies above this cut have a late-type morphology and may be analogous to the "passive spirals" found at lower redshift. We find that 23+/-4% of the early-type galaxies are unresolved multiple systems in the SDSS imaging. We estimate that at least 50% of these are real associations (not projection effects) and may represent a significant "dry merger" fraction. We study the SDSS pipeline sizes of BOSS galaxies which we find to be systematically larger (by 40%) than those measured from HST images, and provide a statistical correction for the difference. These details of the BOSS galaxies will help users of the data fine-tune their selection criteria, dependent on their science applications. For example, the main goal of BOSS is to measure the cosmic distance scale and expansion rate of the Universe to percent-level precision - a point where systematic effects due to the details of target selection may become important.Comment: 18 pages, 11 figures; v2 as accepted by MNRA

International Veterinary Epilepsy Task Force recommendations for systematic sampling and processing of brains from epileptic dogs and cats

Traditionally, histological investigations of the epileptic brain are required to identify epileptogenic brain lesions, to evaluate the impact of seizure activity, to search for mechanisms of drug-resistance and to look for comorbidities. For many instances, however, neuropathological studies fail to add substantial data on patients with complete clinical work-up. This may be due to sparse training in epilepsy pathology and or due to lack of neuropathological guidelines for companion animals. The protocols introduced herein shall facilitate systematic sampling and processing of epileptic brains and therefore increase the efficacy, reliability and reproducibility of morphological studies in animals suffering from seizures. Brain dissection protocols of two neuropathological centres with research focus in epilepsy have been optimised with regards to their diagnostic yield and accuracy, their practicability and their feasibility concerning clinical research requirements. The recommended guidelines allow for easy, standardised and ubiquitous collection of brain regions, relevant for seizure generation. Tissues harvested the prescribed way will increase the diagnostic efficacy and provide reliable material for scientific investigations